This is value creation pedagogy

Value creation pedagogy is when teachers let their students learn by applying their competencies (future or existing) to create something of value to at least one external stakeholder outside their own group, class or school. The value that the student creates for someone else can be economic, social or cultural. A teacher needs to be involved for it to be a question of value creation pedagogy, and it needs to happen in formal education. If not, it is rather a question of ordinary work-life experience or at least an extra-curricular experience.

A rare thing in education
Value creation pedagogy is surprisingly uncommon in education. Most students spend most of their days, weeks, months and years in schooling without ever creating anything substantial of value for someone else. Some would even say that letting students create value for others in school or university has nothing to do with education, since the purpose of education is for the students to learn, not to create value for others. They are not there for someone else to benefit from it, at least not there and then, the usual remark goes.

Some exceptions
There are some types of education where value creation pedagogy is more common. The most obvious example is work-based learning and its siblings apprenticeships, internships and service-learning. When students are embedded in the workplace to learn from practice, they inevitably learn through creating value for others. The organizations they learn and work at normally have customers who benefit from the students’ time and effort. The purpose from the educator’s perspective of this set-up is deeper learning, and the means is letting them create value for the organization’s customers.

A pedagogy meriting more emphasis
This website was created with the ambition to put more light on those rare examples of value creation pedagogy out there. These examples tell a convincing story about powerful, even transformative, deep learning of curriculum content. A story about students being engaged on a level they did not previously experience. A story about learning some hard-to-teach competencies deemed crucial in the 21st century of globalization, competition and relentless technological change and innovation.